The American West

This act approved the building of a transcontinental railroad that would transform the West by linking the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific.

• Manifest Destiny

• Pacific Railway Act

• Homestead Act

• Dawes Act

The 19th-century doctrine or belief that the expansion of the United States throughout the American continents was both justified and inevitable.

• Manifest Destiny

• Pacific Railway Act

• Carlisle Indian Industrial School

• Dawes Act

Organized in Pennsylvania to assimilate Indians into the white culture; changed their clothes, hair, language, taught them academics as well as a skill

• Manifest Destiny

• Pacific Railway Act

• Carlisle Indian Industrial School

• Dawes Act

An act that allowed a settler to acquire as much as 160 acres of land by living on it for 5 years, improving it, and paying a nominal fee of about $30

• Manifest Destiny

• Dawes Act

• Pacific Railway Act

• Homestead Act

An act passed by Congress breaking up Native American reservation land and distributing it to each Native American family. Any leftover land was sold. It ended up being referred to as forced assimilation.

• Dawes Act

• Manifest Destiny

• Homestead Act

• Pacific Railway Act

6This was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States. This act provided an absolute 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States.

• Dawes Act

• Pacific Railway Act

• Chinese Exclusion Act

• Homestead Act

In this writing historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 stated that the settlement and colonization of the rugged American frontier was decisive in forming the culture of American democracy and distinguishing it from European nations. He also stated the frontier was sadly now closed.

• Uncle Tom's Cabin

• The Frontier Thesis

• The Liberator

• The North Star